Hanna Segal (born Hanna Poznańska; 20 August 1918 – 5 July 2011) was a British psychoanalyst of Polish descent and a follower of Melanie Klein. She was president of the British Psychoanalytical Society, vice-president of the International Psychoanalytical Association, and was appointed to the Freud Memorial Chair at University College, London (UCL) in 1987. The American psychoanalyst James Grotstein considered that "received wisdom suggests that she is the doyen of "classical" Kleinian thinking and technique." The BBC broadcaster Sue Lawley introduced her as "one of the most distinguished psychological theorists of our time,"

Life

Hanna Segal was born into a middle class Jewish family in

Łódź Łódź is a city in central Poland and a former industrial centre. It is the capital of Łódź Voivodeship, and is located south-west of Warsaw. Łódź has a population of 655,279, making it the country's List of cities and towns in Polan ...

Poland Poland, officially the Republic of Poland, is a country in Central Europe. It extends from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Sudetes and Carpathian Mountains in the south, bordered by Lithuania and Russia to the northeast, Belarus and Ukrai ...

. She had begun her medical studies at Warsaw University where the family had moved. She was politically involved with the Polish Socialist Party. When Hitler invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, she was fortuitously on holiday in

France France, officially the French Republic, is a country located primarily in Western Europe. Overseas France, Its overseas regions and territories include French Guiana in South America, Saint Pierre and Miquelon in the Atlantic Ocean#North Atlan ...

from where she had to flee arriving in Great Britain (via Switzerland). She completed her medical studies in the wartime Polish medical department at Edinburgh University. She next undertook psychoanalytic training in London, and an analysis first with David Matthews, a pupil of Melanie Klein, and later with Klein herself whose close follower she became and whose work she went on to expound with clarity. It is said that without Segal's introductory works, Klein would not have become so famous, and would certainly have been far less accessible to the reader. She married mathematician Paul Segal in 1946. He died in 1996. There were three sons of the marriage: Michael a civil servant, mathematician Dan, and philosopher

Gabriel In the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam), Gabriel ( ) is an archangel with the power to announce God's will to mankind, as the messenger of God. He is mentioned in the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament and the Quran. Many Chris ...

. Segal also wrote on

aesthetics Aesthetics (also spelled esthetics) is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of beauty and taste (sociology), taste, which in a broad sense incorporates the philosophy of art.Slater, B. H.Aesthetics ''Internet Encyclopedia of Ph ...

, art, symbolism, war, and the September 11 attacks, producing several books and numerous articles, including

Symbolism and art

Segal emphasised the difference between the symbol as representative and the earlier stage of symbol as equivalent, stating that "only when separation and separateness are accepted does the symbol become the representative of the object rather than being equated with the object." The earlier stage of symbolic equation was by contrast typical of concrete psychotic thinking. Building on and extending her analysis of symbolism, Segal made further contributions to Kleinian aesthetics. Segal stresses that "one of the most important tasks of the artist is to ''create a world of his own''", something which requires "an acute reality sense in two ways: first, towards his own inner reality...and secondly...of the reality of his ''medium''." She also emphasised the role of the ugly in artistic creation, as a reflection of the fragmenting of good objects into persecutory ones, seeing the roots of artistic creation in the desire to restore a fragmented inner world.

War

Segal explored the relationship of war to the contrast between the paranoid and depressive positions in Kleinian thought, highlighting the usefulness of the role of an identified enemy in warding off the subjective pain of depression. Segal continued her lengthy examination of the relationship between psychological factors and war in her work on the symbolic significance of the events of September 11.

Criticism

In the main Segal was content to work within the framework Klein had provided. In terms of the distinction sometimes drawn between "extenders", "modifiers", and "heretics" in psychoanalytic theory, Hanna Segal clearly fell into the first category with respect to Klein. Her long-term explication of the richness of Klein's thought nevertheless meant that Segal's work stands close to the core of post-Kleinian research and development. Segal has also been criticised for her belief that lesbian love is a denial of reality, a narcissistic phantasy that is dominated by projective identification and envy, and that lesbian parenthood is an attack on heterosexual parents.

Partial bibliography

* Segal, Hanna (1952)
''A Psychoanalytical Approach to Aesthetics''
'' International Journal of Psychoanalysis''. p. 33. * Segal, Hanna (1957)
''Notes on Symbol Formation''
''International Journal of Psychoanalysis''. p. 38, 391–405.

References

External links

Interview (1999)

* ttp://www.melanie-klein-trust.org.uk/segal2002.htm Hanna Segal, "Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow"
Interview in The Guardian newspaper (2008)

On Desert Island Discs (2006)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Segal, Hanna 1918 births British psychologists History of psychiatry British psychoanalysts British people of Polish-Jewish descent Polish emigrants to the United Kingdom 2011 deaths Analysands of Melanie Klein